Fierce Grace: the unique system designed for you

When you first visited Fierce Grace Brixton, you were probably told about the inter-related system of classes. But what exactly does that mean? This week’s blog explains the cutting-edge, unique system, which was “25 years in the making” and designed specifically for YOU. AND for the person next to you.

Having brought Bikram Yoga to the UK in 1994, Fierce Grace founder, Michele Pernetta, has long steered the revolutionary course of hot yoga. Over the course of two decades Michele has taught over a quarter of a million bodies, of all different shapes, sizes, ages and abilities. Fierce Grace is the culmination of these years of learning and practising, experimenting and innovating.

Through yoga, we cultivate a greater self-belief and self-awareness, experiencing mental and emotional benefits. However, it starts with moving the body. In its simplest form, yoga is a scientific method to maintain, explore and enhance the body’s natural range of movement. This is, in itself, vast… equally as vast as the many facets of our personalities and individuality. Michele began to see that this was not all catered for or drawn out by the existing yoga market or a fixed one-class system. Individuality is not a one-size-fits-all.

Michele therefore devised a menu of classes, each built on the same principles but reflecting the varying ways which we can move our bodies. This also accommodates the changes in our minds and emotions from one day to the next. We have the capacity and need to be inward and softer one day and outward and fiery the next.

The Fierce Grace system supports this 360 degree approach. Working with over 150 postures, the six classes all share the same skeletal system, using the same core postures and the same attention to building a strong and solid foundation within the body.

However, they vary in their energy levels and “different moods” and movements, so that you every day you are changing it up in order to get deeper into the bones, the muscles, the joints and ligaments, getting at them from all angles, nurturing their every need and unlocking their potential. As well as exploring different aspects of your own personality: the quieter sides against the out-there sides, the yin and the yang, masculine and feminine, the fierce and the grace.

And all this whilst having fun. The studios, the teachers, the staff, the branding is all devised on a mission to promote ENJOYMENT. Michele explains:

At Fierce Grace Brixton and across the Fierce Grace network, we want all of our members to feel like they’re coming home. (Or at least to a very clean, warm version of it where your every need is accommodated by a team of helpful, smiling staff! Basically the best home ever.)

Fierce Grace yoga is the yoga-system for everyone: from the ‘stiff, old and broken’ (may we present to you the S.O.B. class! – With our senior teacher Krzysztof breaking the postures down, focussing on alignment and providing any modifications where necessary), your average Joe off the street, to the super fit and the athletes.

A lot of media imagery surrounding yoga focuses on the pretzel-bending ‘wrap your leg around your head’ elite – (Michele: “I have always found the images used to promote yoga in the press very offensive! The tall, blonde, skinny girl in Lotus position in white organic cotton is so off-putting; and I am a tall, blonde, skinny girl! So I can’t imagine how put-off a big bloke with a beer belly must feel.”) Not at Fierce Grace. Here it’s OK to fall over (or would we say actively encouraged?) and to “laugh trying”; we tell students to let go of their pride and “stretch don’t pose”.

At Brixton, we work hard to create an ego-free, down-to-earth, “all-in-it-together” attitude. We say “work hard”, and work hard we do, but in many ways it seems second nature as we all share the same vision of normalising yoga, spreading its joys and encouraging every single person who walks in through our door!

One of our many valued members said to us recently “When I walk into this studio, I immediately feel love. To me, I’m not just coming here to ‘do yoga’, I’m coming here to do yoga with my friends. It’s like a family.” That is what a Fierce Grace studio is: somewhere where you can be yourself, explore yourself and learn to appreciate yourself, whether you can touch your toes or not. (But honestly, laugh trying).

Our advice to you this week FGB-ers is to take FULL advantage of the system put in place for you. Embrace the diversity. Mix it up. Use it to explore the different parts of your body and your self. Get to know yourself.

If you are a Fierce Grace fanatic how about dipping into a Deep Core? Or converting to a Classic? You’ll be surprised what happens when you let loose and throw yourself (please not literally) into different parts (outside) of your comfort zone. Quite soon, you won’t only be Living Life with Fierce Grace, you’ll be living Fierce Grace.